


Spiderwebs.

by rainer76



Category: Fringe
Genre: Gen, Set during the season one episode 'Unleashed'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-26
Updated: 2011-07-26
Packaged: 2017-10-21 18:36:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/228350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/rainer76
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rachel wants to forget, Peter's curious, and Olivia doesn't like her civilian partner calling her sister in the middle of the night</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spiderwebs.

Rachel is six when Olivia pulls the trigger. She remembers the gunshot, the five-second delay before an angry retort splintered the quiet; the sound her mother made - inhuman as if she were flayed alive - but for the most part Rachel remembers the fortress under her bed, pressed up against discarded dolls as she clutched Olivia’s favourite book. Rachel carries _A Winter’s Tale _for the next twenty-two years, like a favourite dress that’s been handed down it _never _suits Rachel’s personality - it irritates her skin, drags at her consciousness - but she totes the novel from one bookshelf to another like a talisman.____

Rachel remembers hiding in her secret fort while her mother screamed, as her stepfather bled out on the front step, a rusty stain against white wood. She hid just like her sister told her, just as they practiced, until Olivia crawled under the bed and curled around her frame like a living blanket, bones knocking together, the shake and rattle of familial terror. Rachel read _A Winter’s Tale _until the police came, peered under the covers and took her older sister away. Rachel recalls the tactile scent of Olivia’s tears, the glimmer in her whiskey coloured eyes, like an animal caught in the headlights of on-coming traffic. They look similar, close enough to be twins her grandmother used to say, but Edna Dunham’s eyesight was never crash-hot; they couldn’t be any further apart.__

Rachel fell in love with Greg in twenty-four hours, she marries him in a fortnight, has Ella by the time she turns twenty-two and regrets none of it. Rachel loves fast; uninhibited; she emerges from the cindered ruins of wifedom with a child, a book, and a new fortress secreted away in Boston. Rachel has a couch to sleep on, a child instead of dolls, a novel she constantly totes but never reads and a belief Ella will never devise a fortress beneath her bed. She tells Peter this with a shiraz in one hand, the steady murmur of voices cresting like a distant seashore and washes forward to kiss him, an exploratory hello. His response is lacklustre. Rachel pulls away. “Why did you invite me out tonight?”

She doesn’t know if she appears accusing, three wines shouldn’t make her feel so suspicious. Rachel feels out of practice. Bars have never been her scene, the college years were defined by the bass hum of raves, by the sweaty tangle of humanity crushed together, Olivia prefers the bar atmosphere as apparently does Peter, but Rachel was the wild child, she found all the rotten boys in all the dingy holes.

“Because not so long ago I was dropped here unceremoniously, too,” Peter says easily. “I thought you could do with some adult company. Other than family, that is.” He tips his bottle back, throat working quietly as he swallows; blue eyes fixed on her. “Why did you say yes?”

Rachel doesn’t want to think about divorce proceedings or the looming custody battle; a brief dip in the river of forgetfulness is appealing, and because Olivia _looks _at Peter from the corner of her eye when she thinks no one’s watching. Rachel notices. “You made Ella laugh,” Rachel says instead. They’ve never been overly competitive, Olivia’s the type that does everything well and Rachel…Rachel was good with boys, better than Liv, who didn’t seem to notice the opposite sex until college. Rachel runs her tongue over her bottom lip, tastes wine, the faint trace of Peter’s beer, and thinks the two flavours don’t mix. “So a friendly outing then?” she ventures.__

“I’m a friendly guy.”

Rachel wonders if she ought to be embarrassed about the attempted kiss, ultimately she decides she’s not. She leans into her booth and talks. It’s surprisingly easy, a free association where the conversation wanders, they share hot chips with tomato sauce – Rachel pulls a face like she’s bitten into a lemon, ‘fries and ketchup’, she corrects plaintively - but Peter just laughs and points out the window, where the signage says _O’Reilley’s Irish Pub _and tells her to see the world a bit. The soccer plays on one television, American baseball on another. He is friendly, Rachel decides, but Peter’s watchful too, and their conversation meanders to her childhood, what Rachel was like, which somehow morphs into what Olivia was like. Her glass is topped up without her ever noticing.__

Rachel tells him about spring break, Ella, she serenades him with a rendition of the pina colada song and laughs helplessly at the memory of Olivia drunk in the streets of New Orleans. Peter leans forward, smile easy, but the intensity of his focus changes, zeroes in, as if Rachel’s giving away snippets of a different personality. Rachel’s never given much thought to Olivia’s colleagues; she doesn’t know why she failed to tell Olivia whom she was meeting tonight. They’ve never been competitive but Olivia’s good at everything and there was a twinge in Rachel's psyche when she saw her sister’s interest, when she recognised what the interest meant.

She doesn’t want to place a name to her emotion; it's best left hidden under the bed.

Peter’s ‘friendly outing’ is a fishing trip; Olivia’s partitioned work and family life behind layered walls of frosted glass, he’s scrubbing the edges to gain a clear insight. If you want to know someone, know his or her family; Rachel wonders if she ought to be offended, like the kiss she implemented and Peter rebuked, she decides she’s not. Tired, loose with wine, tongue mobile, Rachel says. “You could just ask Olivia out, you know.”

“She wouldn’t say yes,” Peter replies promptly. Rachel startles. He meets her eyes frankly, fully aware of all the manipulations at work on the table and smirks.

 _You might be surprised _, Rachel wants to say. She bites her tongue on the words because it’s Olivia’s secret; Rachel won’t reveal her sister’s position. She rolls the dregs of wine around the edges of her glass, watches the fine particles of sediment in the bottom, and thinks Peter seems the overly bright type. She thinks about Escape and decides. “She took me to New Orleans when I was eighteen,” Rachel offers, “Olivia just graduated from Harvard and snuck me into all the bars down Bourbon Street, we karoake-d the song in _Johnny White’s _until the bar staff threatened to throw us out. We were an appallingly bad duet, god, I can’t recall what it’s called, you know the one?” she hums a few bars and Peter nods along, “It’s gonna kill me not knowing…” Rachel trails off, changes the topic mid-stream.____

The rest of the night passes quickly; it’s fun, distracting, Rachel doesn’t think about Greg once in Peter’s company. They part ways and Rachel returns home to find Olivia sacked out on the couch with Ella tucked close, halfway through their nightly ritual of bedtime stories. She kisses her daughter on the crown of her head, kisses Olivia on the cheek and whispers affectionately. “Thank you.”

Olivia looks at her searchingly, a half quizzical smile on her face.

Peter calls the next day with the title of the song. Olivia passes the phone over; Rachel takes it, she makes sure to laugh a little harder, speak a little louder, and if she notices the tension in Olivia’s frame, the way she listens to them, Rachel doesn’t comment.

***  
“Any leads on the fourth victim?”

The student files are scattered over Olivia’s desk, animal rights, the scant information on Swift Research all sharing space. Olivia’s been staring at it for twenty minutes without a single thought in her head relevant to the case. “No.” She stares at Peter and remembers the way Rachel laughed, the flirtation in her sister’s demeanour. Rachel, like Peter, has always been good with people, forming connections, friendships, like the fine strands of an interconnecting spider-web, they both have the same way of putting people at ease, something Olivia’s envies with Rachel, and uses to her advantage with Peter.

Peter slows down as he catches sight of Olivia’s expression. He rests with his back against the wall, coffee in hand, head tilted to one side. “What?”

“Nothing.” Except it’s not nothing. The niggling sensation of _wrong _won’t leave Olivia alone. “You called Rachel last night – anything important?” she says in a rush, barely a pause between her denial of ‘nothing’ and her question.__

Peter huffs a quick laugh and shakes his head. “Hardly. You know that song “If you like pina coladas?” We were trying to remember the name. It turns out it’s called “Escape.”

“So you two are friends now?” She doesn’t like it, Olivia tells herself it’s because work is work and family is family, the two shouldn’t meet, except Olivia can’t hold the standard against Peter, who lives, works, sleeps and investigates right alongside his father. She doesn’t like it, but Olivia can’t tell if it’s concern for Rachel’s welfare or because Olivia is used to being in the cross hairs of the younger Bishop’s attention. Something in her inflection makes Peter’s eyes lock onto her.

“Does that bother you?”

“No,” Olivia lies.

His smile is slow, satisfied, as if Olivia's given something away. It makes her grab for the phone when it starts ringing, never more grateful to hear Charlie’s voice on the opposite end, she can feel the weight of Peter’s stare, familiar, resting on the periphery of Olivia’s awareness.

***

When Olivia goes to work that morning, Rachel fishes out her copy of _A Winter’s Tale _, the pages tatty, spine cracked with age. She never did finish reading it. Rachel could never make it pass the passage she read aloud to Olivia, when her sister was nine and they were both hiding under the bed in the aftermath of the shooting. She smoothes her palm over yellowed pages, over a character called Peter Lake, travelling back and forth in time for love of a woman, and replaces the novel on Olivia’s bookshelf.__

**Author's Note:**

> Dialogue for 'Unleashed' was written by Zack Whedon and J.R Orci, it reappears in part near the end of this story.


End file.
